Month: April 2014
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The key to keeping your audience engaged for a long time is to create value. If you spend most of your time online marketing your brand, people might actually stop listening and may even block your content, in the same way that some users block certain people who post too many things. After all, no one wants to see their feed become inundated with one type of information to the point where they can’t see what others are posting. Instead, your company should aim to create valuable content and release it sparingly or on a regular schedule. This way, you won’t burn people out with your information and you will attract people that are more willing to share your content. Silence is a powerful tool to use.

It only takes a little research to get a clear picture on how social media marketing can help your
organization be more successful. There are compelling reasons why every organization should incorporate social media into their business plans. One of these reasons is the fact that our society is becoming increasingly geared toward technology. Below, I’m going to lay out 10 social
media facts and statistics to help you understand its importance.

1. Seventy-six percent of marketers believe they know what their consumers want when it comes to interaction and social media content. However, only 34 percent of these people have actually taken the time to ask.

2. Fifty-nine percent of marketers believe consumers on social media platforms provide insights on buying decisions, while 58 percent believe the same consumers provide insights on customer service. What this says is there is a disconnection between what marketers think consumers want and what consumers actually value. In reality, 83 percent of consumers place priority on deals and promotions, while 70 percent places an emphasis on some sort of rewards program.

3. When it comes to sharing useful content from businesses, they are more likely to share 79 percent of the time through e-mails, 53 percent of the time through LinkedIn, 39 percent of the time through Twitter, and 18 percent of the time through Facebook.

4. Seventy percent of marketers agree that measuring their social media efforts is difficult, but they still acknowledge the effort they put into social media is important.

5. Social media traffic is measured by 79 percent of marketers, compared to 68 percent of marketers who track engagement metrics on social networks. Only about 26 percent ever took the time to measure the relationship of social media activity to leads and subsequent sales.

6. In 2011, about 47 percent of marketers said they feel good about their social measurement. Four percent described their efforts as being very effective. Forty-seven percent are struggling with how to effectively measure their social marketing and are still learning the ropes.

7. Statistics show that women vastly outnumber men on Pinterest; women make up 80 percent of Pinterest users. The same can be said of Facebook and Twitter, where women also
represent the larger share of total users. On Facebook, approximately 58 percent of users are women and on Twitter, 52 percent of users are women. When it comes to LinkedIn, men outnumber women, making up 73 percent of LinkedIn users. On Google+, men also make up the lion’s share at 71 percent of the total users. It is also worth knowing that half of the people using Google+ are less than 25 years of age.

8. Despite growing trends, the concept of customer relationship management (CRM) is still confusing to many organizations. Sixteen percent of companies in the U.S. say they have a social CRM in place. Twenty-one percent say they plan to implement it soon. A smaller chunk (17 percent) has no clue what a CRM system is or how to implement it.

9. Eighty-six percent of companies worldwide have a presence on Facebook and Twitter. Half of all the companies in the world make use of YouTube and LinkedIn. Pinterest and Google+ attract
just over a quarter of the world’s companies.

10. More than 80 percent of small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) plan to increase their use of social media in 2014. This is not surprising, considering that 87 percent of SMBs say that
social media has helped them in varying degrees over the past year. Of those using social media marketing, social media accounts for 32 percent of SMB marketing activities.

It is no longer enough for businesses to simply be found on social networks. The trends favor businesses that optimize their content across various social media sites, thus combining social marketing with traditional PR and marketing.

There are also sophisticated ways of measuring your business statistics in social media. Organizations that don’t keep up with the changing dynamics of a modern lifestyle and monitor how it affects their field of business are inevitably left behind. This is why more than 92 percent of businesses are incorporating social media as part of their marketing strategy. It’s also important to note that 100 percent of the Top 100 Advertising companies have some form of a social media site. These statistics prove that social media is vitally important to the success of any business.

Periodically tweet short fresh testimonials from your customers. For example: Thank you John who says: using #ZitBeGone has given me more confidence to make every day a success! Tweets like this can help give a potential customer the boost they need to visit your site and possibly purchase your products.

As you probably already know, images and photos can greatly increase the response to a post or tweet so you should definitely take that into consideration. Emotions greatly influence what we buy and what we don’t buy so use photos to bring out the emotions needed to trigger a person’s decision to buy your products and/or services.